> See A Word About Busted Pilots We round out our survey of some of the more notable busted pilots of the season with the distinctive POE, produced by Warner Bros Television for ABC and written by Chris Hollier (a former writer for Kyle XY). Unfortunately, this pilot stands for the proposition that “distinctive” doesn’t […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots The word was that Stephen Gaghan’s pilot METRO was in serious consideration for NBC’s schedule until the very end (conventional wisdom has it that the final choice came down to Metro vs. Awake, and the latter made the cut). That’s too bad: the pilot is an impressive piece […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Had it managed to become a full-fledged series, PARTNERS might have been a decent fit with ABC’s other female-oriented crime shows like Castle and Body of Proof, but based on the pilot, its only points of distinctiveness were probably too gimmicky and contrived to work. The title […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS. In fact, Mark Gordon’s company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots We’ve gotten this far without using the word “ghastly” to describe any of the busted pilots from this year’s development season, but that streak is about to end. HELP WANTED, which was produced by Warner Bros for NBC, is unaccountably bad. Partly that’s a function of its […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots For the most part, actors only get one shot in a given pilot season. Since the lion’s share of network pilots are produced during the same narrow Spring window–allowing them to be picked up and announced at the Upfronts in May–and since actors who play regular characters […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Peter Tolan, who with Denis Leary created Rescue Me, knows something about the comedy that emerges when when men try to assert their masculinity in the most idiotic ways. So you can understand why FOX developed COUNCIL OF DADS, which was meant to bring that kind of tone […]